Senior Robotics Software Engineer – AI-Enabled Manipulation & Industrial Automation
General Motors3 days ago
Base Salary
$153k - $234k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and deploy robotic applications for industrial automation, including pick-and-place, material handling, machine tending, part transfer, inspection support, and vision-guided manipulation.
- Build collision-aware manipulation pipelines integrating perception, pose estimation, grasp generation, inverse kinematics, motion and trajectory planning, collision avoidance, execution, and gripper control.
- Develop computer vision and AI perception systems for detection, segmentation, 6D pose estimation, RGB-D and point-cloud processing, scene understanding, and grasp-point generation.
- Develop closed-loop robotic systems using sensor feedback to monitor execution, detect failures, update actions, and improve reliability.
- Develop and evaluate VLA models and learned policies for multimodal task understanding, natural-language instruction following, action generation, imitation learning, and autonomous manipulation.
- Use NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Omniverse, and Replicator to create digital environments, synthetic data, validation workflows, and simulation-to-real pipelines.
- Own robotic software architecture across perception, planning, control, simulation, AI inference, data flow, system interfaces, hardware integration, and deployment.
- Integrate and calibrate manipulators, grippers, cameras, depth sensors, force/torque sensors, and other automation hardware, including hand-eye calibration and robot-to-cell registration.
- Implement force and compliant control, including impedance, admittance, and guarded moves, for contact-rich insertion and assembly tasks.
- Build data-collection workflows involving teleoperation, demonstration capture, dataset curation, and experiment tracking.
- Debug and validate systems across software, AI models, perception, simulation, motion planning, controls, networking, and hardware.
- Provide technical ownership from prototyping and simulation through hardware integration, validation, and deployment.
- Optionally integrate robotic cells with PLCs and industrial safety infrastructure.
Requirements
- A master's degree in computer science, robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, or a related technical field.
- At least 2 years of experience developing robotic software or applications involving manipulation, perception, motion planning, simulation, industrial automation, or related systems.
- Strong Python, C++, and ROS 2 development skills with experience building modular robotics software.
- Familiarity with AI/ML workflows for robotic perception, learned manipulation, multimodal robotics, and autonomous systems.
- Strong understanding of robotic manipulation, perception, motion planning, controls, coordinate frames and transformations, simulation, and automation software.
- Experience with inverse kinematics, trajectory generation and execution, collision checking, robot state representation, gripper control, and integration of manipulators and sensors.
- Experience developing or integrating perception systems for detection, segmentation, pose estimation, RGB-D, point clouds, or grasp generation.
- Experience debugging complex robotic systems across software, simulation, AI, networking, and physical hardware interfaces.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and technical documentation skills, with the ability to manage complex assignments independently and collaborate across disciplines.
- Preferred qualifications include 5 or more years of experience in robotics software, industrial robotics, AI-enabled robotics, manipulation, or automation systems.
- Preferred experience includes FANUC, Universal Robots, industrial or collaborative manipulators, grippers, wrist-mounted cameras, depth sensors, factory simulation, virtual commissioning, and plant-floor applications.
- Preferred experience includes MoveIt, MoveIt Task Constructor, Lula, RMPflow, OMPL, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Isaac Lab, Omniverse Replicator, VLA models, imitation learning, synthetic data, domain randomization, automated annotation, and simulation-to-real transfer.
- Preferred experience includes 3D perception, PyTorch, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, control-loop optimization, inference-latency optimization, and deploying robotic systems in production or manufacturing settings.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation and holidays, tuition assistance, employee assistance program, and GM vehicle discounts.
- The role is fully onsite five days per week in Mountain View, California, with full-time reporting to a specific location.
- The role includes potential incentive pay based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
About General Motors
General Motors designs, manufactures, and sells cars, trucks, and electric vehicles for consumers and commercial fleets under brands including Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac, and Buick. A public company on the NYSE headquartered in Detroit and founded in 1908, it operates globally and is developing EVs on its Ultium battery platform. Revenue comes from vehicle and parts sales, connected services such as OnStar, and financing through GM Financial.